February 28, 2012

My new Taki's Magazinecolumn includes a surname analysis (courtesy of reader Rec1man) of the latest National Merit Scholar list of semifinalists in California. About 1.6 million high school juniors take the PSAT annually, and the top 16,000 scorers are recognized as semifinalists. The NMSC does not release ethnic breakdowns of semifinalists, so you have to use surname analysis, which is time-consuming and inexact, but fun.

The white/black test-score gap has been in the news since the 1960s, yet rather like Mark Twain supposedly said about the weather, despite all the talk, nobody seems able to do much about it. ...

The big news in this century has been the growing Asian-white test-score gap at the high end.

Consider a feature article in The New York Times over the weekend, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.” It was seemingly commissioned to argue for admissions quotas at the famously competitive Manhattan public high school by pointing out that only 3.6 percent of Stuyvesant’s students are now black or Hispanic, down from 15 percent in 1970. My guess is that the story’s emphasis on a lonely black student was mostly an elaborate framing device for its more newsworthy but downplayed message: Holy God, look at ALL THE ASIANS!

Two major questions remain: Do these outsized Asian elite scores represent higher intelligence, better work ethic, more conniving test preparation, or some combination of all three? And if innate intelligence proves to be a factor, how long will policymakers be able to continue denying it?

Some of it is higher average intelligence, but better work ethic? No, different. If you've ever seen the slog, you wouldn't call it a better work ethic. There's no joy and no real accomplishment in it. Ditto the test prep. It's fairly joyless. It's not about finding the elegant solution, but getting it done.

Asian immigration into our public schools is a real problem and outside of California, no one seems to be thinking of it. Whites in California think of it a lot--it's just that reporters won't talk about it.

But neither Rec1man or I proved very confidence-inducing at identifying white ethnic names, so I didn't include counts for them.

For example, we tried identifying Italians and ended up disagreeing a lot. You can look up names on Google, but it's time consuming.

Overall, my impression would be that the percent of California semifinalists who are Jewish is much lower than in 1975.

One methodological problem is that there aren't a lot of common, instantly recognizable Jewish names (e.g., Cohen, Shapiro, Goldman) on the semifinalist list. There are a fair number of not very common names that could well be Jewish, and somebody with a lot of time could Google each surname.

Similarly, to split Spanish-surnamed kids into Latino and Filipino columns, you could look up each one's picture on Facebook, but that's kind of creepy for a grown-up to do, so we didn't do it.

Sol Stern wrote an article in the 1990s complaining about the quality of the faculty at Stuyvesant -- Teachers with enough seniority could demand a transfer to Stuyvesant even if they weren't smart enough to teach the students.

In elite high school and elite college football, there are lots of whites. But when it comes to NFL, blacks dominate. So, even though Asians do well on tests, when it comes to really doing something outstanding, the future will be belong to the Sergey Brins than to Yangs or Babus.

Because the, uh, Germans who vet the content have a stake in preserving the idea that diversity works. If their readership, not to mention the American population overall, realized the scam, that diversity exists only to dilute European influence in European countries, then there might be some backlash against the, um, Germans.

"So, even though Asians do well on tests, when it comes to really doing something outstanding, the future will be belong to the Sergey Brins than to Yangs or Babus."

Because there are no Asians at elite levels of academic accomplishment these days(ahem, Terry Tao, Ngo Bau Chau, Shing-tung Yau).

"In elite high school and elite college football, there are lots of whites. But when it comes to NFL, blacks dominate. "

You're not just ignorant - your use of analogy and reasoning are defective. Asians increasingly dominate at the NFL-equivalent levels of academic research and accomplishment - you probably didn't gain entry a university of sufficient quality to witness this phenomenon first hand.

Well obviously - I mean look at how the US has maintained unblemished ascendance over the past decade under the prudent foreign policy of the Neo-Conservatives, and the sagacious economic management of Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, while the PRC has just languished beneath the inept rule of the CCP's Politburo.

Koreans in California = children of the shopkeepers who battled during the LA riots

The large Asian category which sweeps up multiple nationalities obscures how different some Asian groups are from each other.

Kims aren't necessarily known for being merit scholars. They are more likely military cadets. There were at least 100 Korean American kids at West Point even back in 1991 according to the below article.

i think we covered this last time we talked about it. it's because now there are lots of korean and chinese teenagers, due to immigration. some of the smart people in south korea and china leave, and move to european nations.

have a hard time believing flips are doing well, though. they're about the same as mexicans in most ways.

of course, california really cannot survive a sustained onslaught from 1 billion people in china and 1 billion people in india, nor was it meant to.

"Kerry" isn't an Irish surname. This is common knowledge. Do you have any evidence Kerry's constituents, some of your favorite bogeymen, believe(d) otherwise? Man, some Irish corner boy really did a number on you back in the day.

The question seems to me is what all these Asian merit scholars have done to benefit 'old stock' Americans.

It is obvious that a lot work in technology or medicine or biological research. It is less obvious to me that our rate of technical progress has really been increased by mass Asian immigration and their wonder kids. After all, the PC revolution began without significant presences of Asians. Ditto the internet and its predecessors. The WWW was though up by a Brit working at CERN switzerland, the first commercial browser by a Swedish-American. The first useful search engine (Altavista) by a French guy, google by white (Jewish) guys. Apple leadership is famously white (Jonathan Ive, another Brit).

And then lets look at meatspace tech. I mean, arent' we supposed to be able to fly a Pan-Am like craft to an orbital space station, from whence we can take our nuke rocket ship to Jupiter's moons by now (or rather, by 11 years ago? What happened to that? Where's my flying car? My personal jet pack? C'mon Asians, get cracking.

I can't tell from your name if you have a dog in this fight... Ahnorimas? Anyway, it's not clear that you are an Asian supremacist so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. The thing is that there is a live debate about Asian underperformance at post PSAT and post-SAT levels. There does appear to be some evidence of a fall-off in relative achievement. To dismiss this debate on the basis of 'look at all these Asian pHDs' is about as nuanced as saying 'I know a really smart Black guy.'

I don't have a view yet on this debate, but I'm expecting some of the protagonists to show up here soon.Gilbert Pinfold.

"Asians increasingly dominate at the NFL-equivalent levels of academic research and accomplishment"

i look for this and don't find it much. i see some guys once in a while but nothing like what people occassionally claim on the blog.

whenever i'm casually checking out science, engineering, or medical fields which i don't know much about, i watch documentaries or check out video presentations on the web of new research. the primary author or chief investigator is, in this order of frequency:

with the other various groups of the world basically rarely appearing. it depends on the field of course. in some fields for instance, european women and jewish women do a lot more than all the east asian men combined. they're outperforming 1.5 billion east asian guys. in other fields it's not close, the east asian men do much more than all women in the world combined.

i do see a lot of east asians publishing in journals but it seems to be more about volume. not to say there are no valuable contributions, there definitely are. but value in this endeavor is measured by frequency of reference. and seminal papers authored chiefly by east asians are still not common. they exist but they're still not typical for most fields. certainly they could become more common. this is a possibility. where they appear most often today is in engineering or physics.

i will refrain from discussing the obvious observation that the american football machine deliberately removes anybody but africans from the talent pool. fortunately a similar situation does not exist with respect to academics.

Tech is dominated by Jews and South Asians these days. If East Asians seriously threatened this dominance, there'd be greater resistance from the tech elite against their immigration. But they're mostly in lower levels and middle management and don't threaten this dominance so there's less resistance.

Steve Jobs, the Founder-CEO of Apple and biggest hero of modern American technology, was the biological son of an Arab Muslim father. I think he looked like a Pashtun from Afghanistan-Pakistan, especially in his younger days and especially when he sported facial hair.

The Global Battle Royale between Apple and Google (founded by two Jews) can be seen as healthy competition between Arab and Jew founded corporations seeking world domination.

"Rankdex" was the first qualitative/inbound linking search engine and it was created by a Chinese guy named Robin Li. Google's algorithm was based on the Rankdex algorithm and there was little change. Google's patents reference Li's work.

http://www.seotreo.com/seo-blog/search-engine-history.html

"While this was going on a small company called Rankdex decided that there must have been a better way to search the web. Webcrawler and Yahoo! were two completely different types of technologies, yet both were successful. There must have been a better way! The company designed a site where they would build on WebCrawler’s design but add a unique value to how they displayed websites. They would look at the amount of websites that had links pointing to the websites in the search and display the top ones that came up in the keyword search in order of incoming links and the value of the links. They called these incoming links backlinks.

Does this technology sound familiar? The two revolutionary students at Stanford that developed a new way to search the web codenamed BackRub did nothing more than figure out a way to market Rankdex’s technology. They added one value-added service to Rankdex, a PageRank and kept their home page very clean looking as they weren’t worried about generating revenue through services like email and news. We wonder where they got the name from…? This iterative algorithm ranked web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Clinton Cimring, a less recognized SEO specialist was able to crack the algorithm from Rankdex that Google “obtained.”"

300 semifinalist of this year Intel talent search 97 of them are Chinese and around 50 of them are Indian

Which goes to show that if you take smart Asians and Indians, and put them in the social and academic framework created by Whites, they can excel as well (note the "as well" part). I wouldn't call either of these nations powerhouses of technical innovation, although that may change in future years.

If you want to see who comprises the elite of the elite, check out http://www.presidentialscholars.org/scholars.asp. The criterion was fiddled a bit in 1979 to get a few black faces into the lineup, but essentially these are the highest achieving National Merit finalists.

The Intel aka Westinghouse talent search has become increasingly dominated by children with connections and access to university STEM research facilities, either through faculty parents or geography. I'm not sure that was always the case.

Steve, does this not make the Steveo-Sphere ambivalent about Affirmative Action? On the one hand, AA keeps Asians out, on the other hand...

What to do, what to do...

Im not sure in what spirit that comment was made but it highlights the problem for whites.

Even here in HBD world we are allowed to oppose AA only if we can concoct a rationale that is objective, thats good for everyone, for 'society'.

God forbid we should oppose it because its bad for us.

So we have AA to promote black interests and we manage to come up with ways to negate that, all couched in objective non-racist terms. Only that attack on AA is couched in terms that allow new ethnic groups come along and snarkily suggest maybe we should keep AA after all because it protects us from those oh-so-bright Asians. Because of course we arent allowed to say we dont want AA because it doesnt suit us and we arent allowed to say we do want it for the same reason.

How about we have our own schools in our own country and Asians and everyone else can shift for themselves back home?

Like all elite venues, the presidential scholars require that you apply for consideration. It would be interesting to see the percentage of Asian applicants who become scholars as compared to the percentage of other ethnicities.

At Thomas Jefferson high school and Harvard, for example, the percentage who succeed is comparable between Asian and whites.

To some degree it's still true that "90% of life is just showing up."

I expect that as Jews have become more assimilated, they have become less interested in intellectual "honors", and more in a normal life with friends, as "Americans" always have been. Robert Hume

To the mathematically challenged person who claims the pagerank algorithm is a minor modification of robin li's search engine. Um, no. The only commonality is the use of inbound links as a basis to rank pages. The math and algorithm are entirely different. Good to know that adding anchor word matches wrt inbound links is the same as creating a stochastic matrix and applying the perron frobenius theorem to it. Both are the not hard, but the latter is at least undergraduate linear algebra/stochastic processes.

The Intel aka Westinghouse talent search has become increasingly dominated by children with connections and access to university STEM research facilities, either through faculty parents or geography. I'm not sure that was always the case.

No kidding.

All of those competitions nowadays are just high-IQ versions of what Roissy recently called toddler whore pageants - giant pseudo-intellectual cat [pussy?] fights for PhD-wielding Tiger Moms with too much time on their hands.

Back in the 1990s at least, perusal of the Harvard freshman facebook (you know, the hardback publication after which the website was named) revealed that the admissions office, in its zeal to represent all 50 states, tended to have around 1 or 2 members of the freshman class from places like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, but no more.

Almost invariably, these folks were Asian-Americans, and I believe NMS/Presidential Scholars.

New York's two Presidential scholars were both children of Chinese immigrants, and both grads of Hunter College HS, both now well-known journalists. This is out of the entire state of New York; each state gets two PS.

Purely subjective impression: the pre-med track (i.e. the most "grind" pathway) was dominated by Asians, while the pre-law track (i.e. the most BS/"verbalist" pathway) was dominated by Jews.

"Like Lin, many Asian-American Christians have deep personal faith, but they are also, notably, almost never culture warriors."

It makes me wonder if this has a population effect similar to what orthodox faith once did for Jews and Christians, i.e. stay sober, work hard, get married, have kids, be fruitful and multiply (as opposed to travel the globe making your documentary film and sleeping with a string of exotic characters until you are 50).

I wouldn't be surprised if a disproportionate percentage of the children of Harvard alumni are children of Asian-American Christians. However, in spite of their personally traditional values, they don't seem to be supporting the GOP "team" to the extent of self-made white men from the extractive industries; on the other hand, they also don't support the ACLU/SPLC/Culture of Critique faction as do the Ivy / lawyer Jews.

In elite high school and elite college football, there are lots of whites. But when it comes to NFL, blacks dominate.So, even though Asians do well on tests, when it comes to really doing something outstanding, the future will be belong to the Sergey Brins than to Yangs or Babus.

Wait, does this mean Jews aren't White?

Either way, we can definitely see from the comments that they aren't ethnocentric.

What about Jerry Yang of Yahoo?

Hey Kat- I mean, Yan Set - why don't you sign your comments any more?

You're not just ignorant - your use of analogy and reasoning are defective. Asians increasingly dominate at the NFL-equivalent levels of academic research and accomplishment - you probably didn't gain entry a university of sufficient quality to witness this phenomenon first hand.

Crackers just make leagues/academies/countries the "superior" Blacks, Yellows, and Jews simply must have access to (and of course, none of them must reciprocate anything).

1.2 BILLION Han in the world. You'd think they could just cogitate a warp drive into existence with that much brainpower, to hear the Yellow Supremacists (AKA, "cognitive elitists") talk.

1.2 BILLION. Yes, many are uneducated peasants. Why? People obsessed with the individual to the point that they ignore even how individuals interact (most HBDers) don't like talking about aggregates. But there they are; why are so many of these 1.2 BILLION Han still peasants (Keep asking WHY for your answers, too; "communism" doesn't explain much)? Why do Han lag so far behind their test results? If there was a paper test for creating the kind of societies and institutions that Han want to join, I'm sure they'd ace it. Doing it on their own? Not so much.

Han have a long way to go before they're ready to create western-style societies (Whites have a long way to go before they're able to defend the societies they create from the kinds of people who destroy them, of course)

>One methodological problem is that there aren't a lot of common, instantly recognizable Jewish names (e.g., Cohen, Shapiro, Goldman) on the semifinalist list. There are a fair number of not very common names that could well be Jewish<

The whole point of Jewish names in the modern era is to disguise Jewishness. Sometimes the name changing occurs too slowly or incompletely and gentiles become, temporarily, experts.

Mr. Murray's methodology, isn't it? Didn't Paul Johnson employ a similar methodology in his Art book, and wound up being disgusted (privately) by Picasso's predominance? Murray was well aware of the technical difficulty posed by PR, echo chambers, and backscratchers, but who is being careful in the world of today's scientific journals?

And the Presidential Scholars represent a complete national sample, whereas National Merit Scholars in CA (and NYC) you would expect to be highly skewed by elite East Asian immigration.

My strong impression is that Presidential Scholars are quasi-selected based on individual states, with each state getting 2-3. Glancing at the list, it looks like Wyoming and Idaho each seem have about the same number as California, Texas, or New York. So based on population, this either means that Wyoming peopla are about 70x smarter than Californians, or the "geographical diversity" is the dominant factor.

Obviously, this totally destroys the usefulness of this metric as a means of measuring ethnic performance. But since so many of the "empty" interior states with tiny populations are so overwhelmingly white European, it allows for lots of white European ethnic cheerleading by the dimmer commenters...

"Perhaps whites see little incentive to study for the low-stakes PSAT"

The PSAT is NOT a low-stakes test. It is probably the highest stakes test of a kid's educational career, at least for smart White kids without connections.

Here's why: A high schooler gets one and only one chance to exceed the cut score for his state to advance to the semifinalist round. While the actual NM scholarship is only $2500, the fact that you got it means many other scholarship foundations start looking at you and can mean many thousands of dollars awarded in total, not to mention bragging rights.

Just miss the cutoff, and you're just another hardscrabble nobody.

Also, scoring exceedingly well on the PSAT gets your name sent to college recruiters in elite colleges who are in a position to tap scholarship funds from their own school.

If White kids aren't studying for PSAT it's because the high school college-coach isn't telling them how much this really matters.

4x overperformance relative to population fraction at the 99th percentile implies avg IQ of 108 vs a larger population of 100. Because of the large NAM population of CA an avg of 106 or 107 is probably enough. Given a small amount of E. Asian selective migration this doesn't seem implausible at all.

See here for effectiveness of test prep:http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/02/test-preparation-and-sat-scores.html

Steve, in your comment in TAKI, you conflate the average of SAT and Number of NMSF. Asian is not a homogeneous group. There is a large Southeast Asian and West Asian population, including some of the very low performing groups such as Hmong people, in California. The performance of those Asians lags behind that of whites. What you see in NMSF are the chinese and Indian. You are talking about different people there.

But we already have the relevant IQ data about Asians in order to determine if the massive Asian overrepresentation of Asians in schools can be IQ-based.

According to Murray, Asian Americans are at IQ 103 - mathematically, it is simply impossible for this to account for Asian numbers in schools. You know this, Steve, so I dont understand why you are being coy about it. It is disappointing to see you engage in linguistic ambiguity of the kind one usually finds conservatives employing at liberal mags.

Any way you slice it, there must be some other factor - I have no idea if that factor is work ethic (everyone insists, INSISTS, that SATs and admissions tests cannot be studied for), but it clearly cannot be IQ.

We dont know what it is, but we know enough to rule out IQ on its own. So if we want to move forward from here, we really need to loudly and clearly acknowledge this fact.

Its a very interesting question - on the one hand, amongst certain types of people IQ is God and can literally explain everything. On the other hand, IQ utterly fails at explaining Asian, and even Jewish numbers, at elite schools and some professions. What is the committed HBDer for whom the infallibility and universal applicability of the IQ test is an article of religious faith to do? Why, to use fudging language like *we dont know yet if it is only IQ*, etc.

Whether for cultural reasons or not, Brahmins do seem pretty well-represented in extreme g-loaded professions (to be a top 5 Math department faculty member probably needs an IQ of 170 + high levels of creativity).

Some further data on Brahmin representation, this time pertaining to a subset of Brahmins, quoting what I found on another blog:

Tamil Brahmins have "won 3 Science Nobels (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, C.V. Raman), the only Abel Prize that a non-White has got(Srinivasa Varadhan), the only Nevanlinna prize that a non-White has got (Madhu Sudan), produced the greatest Mathematical autodidact in the last century (Srinivasa Ramanujan), and produced the current world chess champion (Viswanathan Anand). Further, Tamil Brahmins are almost definitely going to bring South Asians their first Fields Medal (Akshay Venkatesh/Kannan Soundararajan), and have produced the youngest person (Vinodhini Vasudevan) to ever get a perfect SAT score at age 12 (also the only one to do so out of 600,000 gifted seventh- and eighth-graders the program has tracked through two decades). "

Also note: Indians are actually not badly represented as Math faculty members when compared to Chinese at super elite universities.

"And now on to the Waterman awardees ("The Alan T. Waterman Award is the United States's highest honorary award for scientists no older than 35", URL here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_T._Waterman_Award) :

3 Indian winners - 2 North Indian Brahmins, and 1 North Indian upper-caste winner.

Multiple time Putnam fellows: "In the history of Competition, only seven students have been Putnam Fellows four times, with nineteen others winning the award three times. "

3 Indians: 1 North Indian Brahmin, 1 South Indian Brahmin, and 1 North Indian non-Brahmin upper caste individual."

Steve, the PSAT is theoretically much more important than SAT because that is where you are name "National Merit Semifinalist". That's the only "you either are or you aren't" factor in the entire game. Imagine the shame in not being one....

"i do see a lot of east asians publishing in journals but it seems to be more about volume. not to say there are no valuable contributions, there definitely are. but value in this endeavor is measured by frequency of reference"

That's why you're looking at the wrong place Jody. Thompson Reuters has for the past few years published a Top 10 papers list for the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. These are supposed to be the top 10 most highly cited new papers over some 2 month period. The majority of the leading author names in the fields of physics and chemistry are East Asian.

I'm sure most of these kids are very bright, but their success on tests is more a sign of diligence than brilliance. Of course, dumb kids cannot do well even with diligence, which is never enough on its own. But, diligence can go a long way to make very bright kids seem like geniuses that they are not.

Also, though these tests may not be difficult, they may still be within the range of 'excellence results' if the student is very smart(even if not a genius) and very industrious.

Let's use the analogy of weight-lifting. Suppose the objective is to bench press 250 lbs. Not easy for many men, but with lots of practice, healthy and reasonably strong men can do it. They don't have to be super-strong to make the cut. But would they be able to bench press 400 lbs even with lots of practice. No, most would not be able.

So, even as these exams are challenging, they may be within the range of mastery for many students who are very smart(but not geniuses).

But suppose these tests were designed to be much more difficult, whereby only brilliant geniuses will be favored over everyone else. And then, the Cohens and white geniuses will beat Asians.

The "Asian Underperformance" is explained by racism. Elite SWPL are fearful of competent people competing against them. It cuts into their golf time. So they discriminate against Asians and non elite whites by using affirmative action and stereotypes.

Black people have always been the best athletes in this country. But it is only about 50 years ago that blacks started becoming successful in sports. Why? Because prior to this, they were discriminated against.

The Presidential Scholars are not "the highest-achieving national merit scholars". They are the ones with the best teacher recommendations. So they're usually the nicer kids among the NMS finalists but no more. I can also see how Asians could wind up underrepresented if white teachers tend to be not so impressed with a kid who gets high marks but otherwise seems autistic and, thanks to intense coaching and parenting, already bumping up against his ultimate potential.

"But suppose these tests were designed to be much more difficult, whereby only brilliant geniuses will be favored over everyone else. And then, the Cohens and white geniuses will beat Asians."

But it seems like we already have tests that are much, much, much more difficult than the SAT/PSAT exams. We have tests taken by IMO or IPhO competitors and it seems like the Asian kids still outperform the Cohens and other white kids.

"Whether for cultural reasons or not, Brahmins do seem pretty well-represented in extreme g-loaded professions (to be a top 5 Math department faculty member probably needs an IQ of 170 + high levels of creativity)."

It seems plausible, but I wonder if the stated criterion for becoming a top math professor is true. Creativity and high IQ are actually somewhat anti-correlated since ultra high IQ seems to be the result of flawlessly organized brain circuits whereas creativity implies leaky circuits and novel brain architectures. Perhaps a high IQ mathematician can induce creativity through sleep deprivation, alcohol consumption, or LSD ingestion.

Asians students do much more to maximize their potential on standardized exams than whites or Hispanics. When I taught at a private high school in California, my Asian students almost all prepped for the SAT. Few of my white or Hispanic students did. I wouldn't be surprised if many Asian students aren't being encouraged by peers and parents to prep for the PSAT.

The focus on the SAT among Asians shown in the movie Better Luck Tomorrow is not unrealistic.

"attended the California Institute of Technology from 1976 to 1978, majoring in Chemistry, and received a B.A. degree in Political Science from Stanford University in 1980. He received a J.D. degree from Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) in 1984. In 1997, [he] received a B.S. degree in Biology from The George Washington University."

Who drops chem. at CalTech to do poly-sci at Stanford, and then onto a 3rd tier law school?

There are around 700 million Europeans, 300 million MENA & Caucasus region, 200 million Americans, 100 million South Americans, over 100 million Russians, about 50 million Canadians, Australians, NZ'ers, that are Caucasians. This is around 1.5 billion Caucasians.

East Asians have higher mathematical I.Q than whites, and obviously work harder. But they are lacking in creativity.

What Asians lack is not creativity, but ambition (as in a drive for power), and status seeking. Asians do work hard, and can compete just as well as any anyone else. Eastern religions don't make them into navel-gazing hippies.

A white guy in the techno-jungle would jump at the chance of breaking into Management, but an Asian would be perfectly happy code-bashing for the rest of his life.

It seems plausible, but I wonder if the stated criterion for becoming a top math professor is true. "Creativity and high IQ are actually somewhat anti-correlated since ultra high IQ seems to be the result of flawlessly organized brain circuits whereas creativity implies leaky circuits and novel brain architectures. Perhaps a high IQ mathematician can induce creativity through sleep deprivation, alcohol consumption, or LSD ingestion."

Some high-IQ people are good with numbers, some are good with words, some are good with shapes and geometrics, etc. Though there is a root-intelligence common to all kinds of intelligence, a person who may be good with words may not necessarily be good with numbers, and a person who is good with numbers may not be good with shapes. Look at highly intelligent artists. Kubrick was super-smart but maybe he wouldn't made such a great musician. Dylan's very smart too, but maybe he wouldn't have been much of a filmmaker. Norman Mailer knew how to write but did you see his movies? He had no knack for it.

Also, having high IQ doesn't mean one is emotionally stable. If anything, it can lead to greater instability cuz a smart person thinks too much stuff he or she should just leave alone. I think maybe lots of Jews are neurotic cuz they 'think too much'. But it leads to fears and anxiety, which can feed creativity. Take Kafka.

The typically unambitious As-Am encounters glass ceilings mostly because of his lack of desire to be a superboss, and the byzantine politics of bossdom. Thus few As-Ams go into management, and it's mostly a white and/or Jewish preserve.

While in Asia itself, someone must be the manager, and foreigners are hardly welcome or trusted with such power. So of course an Asian runs the company, but somewhat reluctantly, and he treats it more as an obligation than a powertrip, balancing power with an awesome sense of responsibility rarely seen on this side of the Pacific.

"During the second half of the 20th century there have been around 25 East Asian Scientific Nobel Prize winners, compared to around 500 whites."

What about the fact that even today, China is relatively poor and backwards? In other words, for most of the second half of the 20th century, virtually all East Asians(China alone has a population of 1.34 billion) have lived in backwards countries with 3rd world institutions and infrastructure. It's not a surprise to find that the first East Asian country to modernize, Japan, has fared the best in these regards.

Interestingly enough, I counted only 5 Japanese nobel laureates in the natural sciences from 1900-2000, but 10 alone from 2000-2010. So obviously something is going on there.

But probably because of the time lag associated with Nobels, which are often awarded for work done decades ago and the fact that even today China is still relatively undeveloped, we'll have to wait for a few decades before seeing all of East Asia take off like Japan has done since 2000.

Interestingly enough, I counted only 5 Japanese nobel laureates in the natural sciences from 1900-2000, but 10 alone from 2000-2010. So obviously something is going on there.

So a 100 year trend is suddenly broken by a 10 year trend, and you conclude that the 10 year trend is the significant one? That sounds like special pleading. Sometimes long term trends experience slight blips - it seems likely this is one of them. Another possibility is that as the West declines, even minor innovations begin to take on greater significance. Much of the Asian achievement we have seen in the past 20-30 years is only relative. People often forget this.

Japan industrialized at roughly the same time as Germany, so no time lag can be invoked for why the Japanese have not been more creative. The Japanese were able to demonstrate incredible talent in building fantastic versions of Western technologies very soon after having embraced Western science - the Japanese had a huge edge in weapons in WW2 - so there seems little reason to think they were still finding their feet scientifically. Interestingly, the ONLY talent the Japanese have ever shown to possess in special abundance is the ability to create incredibly efficient versions of Western technologies, and they showed this almost immediately - if they had the capacity for creativity, they would have shown this soon as well.

Now, the *time lag* theory for Chinese and other Asians does not add up either, because most of the originality we saw in the West did not depend on modern infrastructure but was theoretical in nature, and there was nothings topping Chinese or Korean thinkers from sitting down and coming up with original and ground breaking theories. Yet while Western thinkers were doing precisely that, Asian thinkers - despite a strong sense of competition with the West - failed to do so. Nothing was stopping them. Where was the Asian Einstein? Did Einstein need access to sophisticated infrastructure to come up with his pioneering innovations?

Moreover, scads of Asians have been studying in the West since the 19th century, having access to all that modern infrastructure that is supposedly - and mysteriously - necessary for coming up with original theories. One would expect at least SOME to make original contributions, if they had it in them.

Further, to expect powerful originality to come AFTER a process of development is to ignore the history of innovation in nearly every original culture in the West - what happens is that at the BEGINNING of exposure to new ideas and novel ways of thinking, a massive burst of creativity is unleashed, which DIES DOWN after *development* occurs. Western originality came BEFORE there was any *modern infrastructure* - in fact, it CREATED this *modern infrastructure*. So it is a fundamental mistake to think that the modern infrastructure must precede creativity - it is rather the other way around.

The sad fact is, if history is anything to go by we should have expected a massive burst of creativity at the BEGINNING of Asian contact with the West, in the first 50 years or so. Greece started with a period of creativity followed by decline. Western Europe started with the Rennaissance (exposure to a new culture), and then gradually declined. Yet now we are to suppose that Asia will reverse this historical process, and develop originality only after a lengthy process, where the new culture and ideas have lost their freshness and become thoroughly absorbed.

So unfortunately, the *time lag* theory of lack of Asian creativity has to be seen as just ethnic advocacy that ignores the most significant facts of history and flies in the face of how every original culture developed.

1. The Tamil brahmins of south India are a tiny fraction of India's 50+ million brahmin population who overwhelmingly live in the deeply impoverished and backward northern states of U.P. and Bihar. Why do they perform better than the more authentic and far more numerous brahmins of north india? Maybe because they were under british rule far longer combined with the fact that hindu casteist culture is the opposite of a meritocracy and reserved education for brahmins. Ditto for bengali brahins who are almost as boastful as tamil brahmins, who were also under british rule much longer than other indians

2. The brahminness of the tamil brahmins is questionable. Their orthodox nambudiri brahmin neighbours in Kerala considered them low caste sudras.

3. Genetically the tamil brahmins are closer to the south indian dravidian population than to the brahmins and low caste sudras of Punjab in northwest India.http://www.harappadna.org/

4. The tamil brahmins on average are darker than the already very dark average for Indians. The Nobel Laureate Chnadrashekhar was considered a black man in America in the 1950s. Ramakrishnan the latest Nobel Laureate (in chemistry) is as black as Michael Jordan and kinda looks like a nerdy version of the latter:

true, true. so we'll recalibrate the outperformance factor by half. it's still means that in some fields of science, "dumb" european women have done more in the last couple decades than 700 million east asian men combined. in other fields of course, it's the reverse.

east asian women almost never do any important, pioneering work, so i didn't even put them on the list. the hot topic in education today is how women have passed up men. well, east asian girls are the ultimate studious students. they can overwhelm any academic facility with hordes of straight A pre-meds. who go on to make nice PCPs. but if society had to rely on them to come up with new surgical procedures, develop new pharmaceuticals, or do basic research in biology, we'd be in trouble.

i just checked the list of nobel prizes in physiology or medicine and i didn't see a single east asian woman. checked a list of the most widespread pharmaceuticals and most were developed by evil, boring, "dumb" european men. a few by jewish men. last year i checked out one of my new topics, "Who comes up with surgeries?" and in my research did not find a single modern, widely practiced surgery which was developed by an east asian woman. of course it wasn't an exhaustive exploration of the topic, but it wasn't shallow either.

then again, change from medicine and biology, to engineering, and it's completely reversed. east asian men as a group over any women. a german woman is way ahead of any east asian men with her robot flesh factory, but east asian men are way ahead of any women in industrial factory robotics. this is an issue with any women of any kind. once you start working with your hands, women drop out of the highest level of the field in droves. if we had to rely on marilyn vos savant to come up with jet engines or CPUs, we'd be in trouble. "dumb" men with half as much math ability as her would be a vastly superior bet to save the earth from incoming asteroids, for instance. then again, if we had to rely on east asian men, or anybody other than plain old "dumb" white guys. we'd be in serious trouble as well. aeronautical engineering is not their thing.

"The Intel aka Westinghouse talent search has become increasingly dominated by children with connections and access to university STEM research facilities"

yeah i noticed this about 10 years ago. you have to be super interested in hardcore science work itself at age 16 - what normal kid is, even really smart ones? then do 2 years of research, with a university professor as your mentor, and present your project for consideration at age 18. lolwut? i went to school with guys with IQs in the 160 range. when we were that age, there was zero interest in this kind of thing from anybody.

Why are the japanese-american kids so underrepresented in all this? Is it because they are mostly 4th or 5th generation descendants of immigrants and have become assimilated to the american culture like the italians and irish who are also conspicuous by their absence? Why hasn't this assimilation dumbed down the jews?

In Hawaii the japanese outnumber the whites and constitute the highest percentage of residents yet Hawaii students rank second to last in the US. Only Mississipi is worse.

2 month period? we're talking about a time scale of a decade here, for relevance. and i already said they appear most commonly in physics. the new intel ivy bridge CPU uses a transistor designed by 1 european and 2 east asians, for instance.

in chemistry it's mostly volume, from what i've seen. i went to the ACS convention a few years ago and this was my impression, as well as the impression from my friend who's a physical chemist. as i've said, i hardly think there are no important original works, but it's not like asian men now come up with everything in chemistry. that's so not true. in the energy sector for instance i actually have a hard time coming up lots of important chemical processes originally devised by them.

the world operates on chemical engineering devised primarily by europeans. asians did NOT come up with modern fracking, for instance. it was developed, in fact, by those dreaded, hated, terribly unvibrant and "dumb" white guys. that's why they operate private energy companies worth 200 billion dollars and east asians don't. east asians don't have anything like koch industries, for example, let alone pfizer, roche, novartis.

if they were really that smart, china would be so far ahead of every other nation in defense. but they're not. why don't chinese surface vessels already have the 64 MJ railgun which the "dumb" europeans are still working on? because they don't even have subs as good as the russians. why haven't the chinese already figured out what the heck dark matter is while the "dumb" europeans are still busy merely observing it and calculating it's effects? because they don't even have telescopes and satellites as good as the ESA.

why haven't the chinese already found the higgs boson? hell, why is it even CALLED a higgs boson? clearly it should be called a chang boson, or a li boson, or a chu boson?

"The "Asian Underperformance" is explained by racism. Elite SWPL are fearful of competent people competing against them"

all those elite SWPLs in china, keeping the 1 billion chinese down, and stopping them from utterly dominating every field of science and engineering, as they obviously should. the koreans are under the same whitey induced duress. there's an evil WASP in every korean high school and university, sabotaging all their original research efforts and destroying all their original engineering documents.

"Black people have always been the best athletes in this country. But it is only about 50 years ago that blacks started becoming successful in sports. Why? Because prior to this, they were discriminated against."

africans in africa discriminate against themselves? i mean there's 1 billion of them. i'm still waiting for them to dominate every sport with salaries over 1 million dollars a year. any year now, south african africans are going to bust out, and just take over every sport, as ESPN reminds us daily. this is their destiny.

"East Asian leading authors are also very well represented in the field of biology."

they post a lot of journal articles. which is what i said. how valuable it turns out to be, is measured by how much it turns out to contribute to something, anything. and usually it doesn't. which is true of most research of course but it's more commonly the case here. lots of churning away and article production but less long term impact by a good amount. certainly this can change. maybe it will. but in 2012, no, east asians don't come up with most stuff in the lab. a few things, but not even close to mostly everything.

Poverty really a valid excuse. Japan has been an industrialized country for almost 100 years. In per capita terms, Japan and Korea have one fifth as many scientific Nobel winners (since 1945) than western Europe, one *tenth* of the United States.

Even during the 1990-2010 the U.S was getting scientific Nobels at three time the rate of Japan.

Nor have Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore produced many Nobels, though they are rich and highly educated.

Even Communist Soviet Union got it share of Nobels. Why not communist China?

The simpler explanation is that they are actually significantly less creative. In my field of research, the difference between East Asians on one hand and Europeans/Americans/Indians/Jews on the other is easily noticeable.

This despite the fact that Asians are significantly above average technically.

I have no illusion that this will save us in a struggle between 1.5 billion Chinese and 0.2 billion useful Americans.

Once Japan grew rich after WWII, there was no need for Japanese to emigrate to other countries. If anything, Japanese-Brazilians have been trying to emigrate back to Japan. So, since the 60s, most Asian immigration has been from China, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, etc. More recently, I think smarter East Asians are coming here, which means massive brain drain for East Asia.

What we are seeing is that Jews are beginning to neglect vanity projects in terms of intellectual achievement - they no longer care about dominating purely social markers of intellectual success, that are more about vanity than real accomplishment.

So far as I know we have not seen any decline in Jewish Nobels or in Jewish names amongst famous intellectuals in all areas. Has there been such a decline? THAT would be a significant marker. But as far as I know where it counts, Jews perform as well as ever. But in terms of social vanity markers, Jews simply no longer have the motivation they had when they were outsiders in American society - which is exactly what one would expect.

Interestingly, whites have been underperforming their average IQ in terms of vanity and prestige projects (including admission to an elite unis, which is in many ways more about vanity than economic success) for quite some time now, which is precisely what one would expect - viewed from sociological perspective - from the group that has the most secure social position and feels the least need to *prove* anything.

That Asians are exerting enormous effort to do well in areas whose significance is to a high degree about vanity and prestige makes total sense. It brings to mind the way many Third World countries spend enormous amounts to build sparkling, palatial airports, while LAX is a dump ;)

That Jews are now converging with Whites in terms of their indifference to vanity projects is something that we should have expected.

I predict that in 50 years, the crazy Asian numbers we are seeing now in all these fields - coupled with a troubling lack of real world excellence - will diminish considerably and become more in line with their average IQ, which will still give them a modest overrepresentation in some fields, but nothing like what we are seeing now.

When that happens, we will know that Asians have *arrived* as Americans and no longer feel the need to *prove* themselves, and we can welcome them into the fold ;) But before that Asians will have to come to terms with the painful reality that their talents are far more modest than they would have wished. The Japanese have already gone through this self-reckoning, and are the most relaxed and easy going of the Asians as a result.

I agree with the previous Anon. Despite the huge time lag associated with Nobel Prizes, which are often awarded for work done decades earlier, there have been 10 Japanese Nobel laureates in the natural sciences since 2000, compared to only 5 in the previous 100 years. Either the Japanese suddenly became vastly more creative, or the previous Anon has a point about time lag and institutional development.

Plus, I think the Thompson Reuters Top 10 lists are a pretty convincing indication that today, more and more of the high level scientific work is being done by East Asians.

Arabs led the world for a few hundred years during the Islamic Golden Age of Science, before Europeans took off during the Renaissance. Then in the late 1800s, Jews suddenly came out of nowhere, despite the fact that they had contributed almost nothing of note to Western civilization for hundreds of years before. My suspicion is that East Asians may be the next group to take off.

"The Japanese have been poor-mouthing their lack of creativity for as long as I can remember."

Japanese can be creative but not always in the best way. I mean harakiri may be the most creative way to kill oneself, but ouch.

I think maybe the problem with Japan is critualism. Japanese are creative but prone to ritualism, and so whenever they create something, they become overly obsessed with it. So, it becomes almost sacred. Instead of encouraging more creativity, it becomes the Correct Creation to preserve or perfect; which may explain why Japanese favor micro-innovation and refinement than macro-innovations that fundamentally change the paradigm.

Take the tea ceremony. Maybe it took a lot of creativity to come up with it, but it's like every Japanese had to sip tea that way. So, Japanese creative-ritualism or critualism sometimes stands in the way of endless creativity.

To the commenter who seems apoplectic about rec1man not acknowledging the dravidian admixture in tamil brahmins. Ummm.. it does not matter. 3000 years of relative endogamy changes things. The frequency of genes responsible for iq matter so so so much more than junk genes that make low caste people presume that they are genetically similar to tamil brahmins.

If White kids aren't studying for PSAT it's because the high school college-coach isn't telling them how much this really matters.

I can't speak for what happens today, but I remember in the 1980s being told not to worry about the PSAT, that it was just a practice test to get us prepared for the SAT. Most of us had no idea what the actual importance of the PSAT was.

When I got to college, other kids from better suburban high schools told me how seriously they took the PSAT. I also learned these kids were far better prepared as most had taken AP courses which my little school did not offer. I wonder how many white kids in smaller areas today are in the same predicament.

My state is odd. They organize school districts based upon the town. So a small town of 700 will have its own high school of 75 students, grades 9-12. Therefore, within a twenty mile radius of my small town, we had at least 6 high schools serving their own little towns that ranged in size from 75 students to 500 students. I have seen other states consolidate smaller communities like this into one larger high school. I imagine that would lead to more opportunities for AP classes, better teachers, and better competition to prepare these kids for the future.

Either the Japanese suddenly became vastly more creative, or the previous Anon has a point about time lag and institutional development.

Or its a mere statistical anomaly which portends nothing. I love how certain people simply will not consider this possibility, which probably strikes most objective observers as the one most consistent with Occams razor.

Arab intellectual leadership was relative - no one was competing with them. Asians have been competing with Europeans for the past 150 years, and the results are plain and rather persistent. The idea that tomorrow, or after tomorrow, or the day after, Asians will start REALLY unleashing their creative powers, just you wait, it just takes one more Japanese bridge or highway to complete the *modern infrastructure* so essential to creativity, but apparently only to creativity in Asians ...well, we know what position a person has to find himself in when he resorts to visions of future accomplishment for consolation.

Further, the intellectual ferment of the Muslim world was mostly a matter of Jews, Byzantines, and other conquered peoples with a long scholarly tradition - not Arabs. The Arab conquerors merely provided the framework, and for a period, the necessary religious tolerance. So it is a very poor example of a less capable people temporarily showing superior talents and then lapsing into its essential mediocrity (although strangely, why not apply this logic to Japanese Nobels post 200? No, here it is clearly not a case of a less capable people showing to temporary advantage ;))

And Muslim civilization was mostly a matter of conserving Greek texts, nothing particularly brilliant in its own right was done. Heck, even Chinese civilization has more genuine intellectual achievements under its belt ;)

Consider also that the postwar Japanese economy was geared towards heavy industry for the export of tangible good to America. There was little room for science, especially theoretical science, as opposed to engineering based corporate R&D. Imperial Japan had more emphasis on science than the Japan of 1945-1990.

I believe Steve Sailer once wrote that the most underutilized resource in America today are whites in general and white males in particular. If other states organize their high schools like Missouri, which I described above, then I wonder how many white kids are being given a substandard education given that these rural areas are overwhelming white, unless of course a meatpacking plant is around. In that case other problems come into play.

Of course despite the fact that Stuyvesant was 15 percent black at one time, there seem to be precious few black grads from there that accomplish a lot in science. The number of Jews by contrast at Stuyvesant, Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech who have gone on to dominate particularly in mathematics and physics is off the charts. I think the Wikipedia entry on the 3 mentions that these high schools have produced more top scientists then some reasonably high end colleges and universities. In fact if you read the article on these specialized schools, it states ( In a surprised tone ) that despite far more preparatory classes for "disadvantaged students" in grades 6-8, their numbers continue to decline ( Head Scratching, isn't it ? ) Things are so frustrating when reality doesn't conform to diversity bureuacratic diktat, isn't it?

Also note: Indians are actually not badly represented as Math faculty members when compared to Chinese at super elite universities

Of course, East Asians have already captured six Fields Medals ( If you include the Vietnamese guy who won in 2010 ) but generally you are right, some South Asians are no doubt on the short list for future ones, so they are beginning to catch up. A guy like Chandra probably would have become a mathematician had his father not objected, instead he became a great theoretical physicist.

"East Asians have higher mathematical I.Q than whites, and obviously work harder. But they are lacking in creativity."

Anyone who subscribes to this notion is sadly ignorant - I guess really the only thing a lot of WN types have left to cling to though given that 2nd-generation East Asians beat them in tests of verbal aptitude.

You ever read anywhere in a book that Chinese civilization is utterly original and prolific - that China and Japan have produced a few poets, painters and original thinkers of note?

They are about 55 - 58% ANI, vs 60% ANI for bengali brahmins and 65% ANI for Uttar Pradesh Brahmins.

The highest ANI ( caucasoid ) is for Jats at around 75%

Increasing caucasoidness does not increase IQ. There is a very big stereotype of Jats being as dumb as buffalos.

Dravidian mid-level castes are around 47% ANI and untouchable Dravidians around 38% ANI.

However, ALL brahmins sampled by Harappadna.org, show a 10-15% West European component, which is lacking in even high level dravidian castes like Reddy.

Next, the key difference between North Indian and South Indian brahmins is that , North Indian brahmins are about 45% R1A, whereas South Indian brahmins are about 28% R1A and 17% L1. L1 is the modal haplogroup for Dravidian castes

Finally the Dravidians severely discriminate even against tamil brahmins whether they are fair or dark

One can make a case that their gear was pretty good by 1930s standards. Their navy was large and powerful. But Im not sure one can say they had any equipment that was better than anyone elses or even as good as in most cases.

WW2 Japanese equipment can be seen as equivalent to that of Italy. So-so at the beginning of the war but increasingly outclassed by US, British, German & Soviet weapons.

Jews over-estimate themselves because they've been competing as a cohesive middle eastern group inside open northern euro founded societies. It won't be the same when there's multiple cohesive Asian ethnic groups competing as teams.

The duke of qin argument amuses me no end. Forget nobels, there is no arena of scientific, engineering, or philosophical thought where east asians are more than a speck. In an alternative universe without east asians the modeen world would look just the same. Take euros away and you would wind up in feudal east asia. I guess those darned swedes are biases against incremental changes and for radical innovation. If the chinese awarded a nobel i guess it wouldbe all chinese peasants all the way.

Japan going from 5/decade to 10 is the result of two research groups sharing prizes.

Note the irony: Japan has so few prizes that the variance is high. There has been no explosion of Korean prizes either. Compare with Israel..

A large percentage of "arab" scholars were Jew or Berber or Persian.

“As Ibn Khaldun suggests, it is a remarkable fact that with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars…in the intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs”:"Thus the founders of grammar were …. All of them were of Persian descent…they invented rules of (Arabic) grammar…great jurists were Persians… only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet becomes apparent, 'If learning were suspended in the highest parts of heaven the Persians would attain it"…The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them…as was the case with all crafts…This situation continued in the cities as long as the Persians and Persian countries, Iraq, Khorasan and Transoxiana (modern Central Asia), retained their sedentary culture.

Ibn Khaldun is the most important muslim historian.

“Anyone who subscribes to this notion is sadly ignorant”

OK, so what is your evidence for Asian creativity? For the record, I am not white. It’s just my empirical judgment that creativity goes Ashkenazy-White-East Asian.

"The upper bound of possible jewish names was about 125...they were swamped by 184 Indian names and 974 east asian names"

lolz

."In a competition between East Asians and Jews, I'm surprised people seem to expect the Jews to hold up their end. Worldwide there are over 1.5 billion East Asians of all types. Jews, maybe a little less."

I didn't. However judging from this thread they did. hehe

."According to Murray, Asian Americans are at IQ 103 - mathematically, it is simply impossible for this to account for Asian numbers in schools...Any way you slice it, there must be some other factor"

Clearly it can if there's lots of different Asian groups and their collective IQ score was averaged.

."What is the committed HBDer for whom the infallibility and universal applicability of the IQ test is an article of religious faith to do?"

Did you know paragraphs of densely packed straw men and passive-aggressive insults are an ethnic signature created by the combination of traits of high verbal dexterity and extreme ethnic aggression?

Now you do.

."the Japanese had a huge edge in weapons in WW2"

No they didn't.

."Western Europe started with the Rennaissance (exposure to a new culture), and then gradually declined"

The Western Renaissance started with the end of a 1000 year deflation and got better and better in every way till the 60s when it was poisoned. If we got rid of the poison we'd go back to getting better and better again.

.Anyway i would suggest paleos stop sulking about the South and East Asian top slice being clever and instead sit back and enjoy the giant DOH! from YKW.

They are about 55 - 58% ANI, vs 60% ANI for bengali brahmins and 65% ANI for Uttar Pradesh Brahmins.

The highest ANI ( caucasoid ) is for Jats at around 75%

Increasing caucasoidness does not increase IQ. There is a very big stereotype of Jats being as dumb as buffalos.

1. The Nairs who the tamil brahmins are "identical" to are snake worshipping lower caste sudras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nair#Caste_system

2. The punjabi jats who have the "highest ANI (caucasoid)" are low caste sudras. The punjabi chamars/outcastes also look more caucasoid than tamil brahmins.

3. If "caucasoidness does not increase IQ" why are you boasting about tamil brahmins having a little higher ANI than the dravidians?

4. Casteism is irrational and anti-meritocratic and probably accounts for India's weakness and backwardness. There are numerous examples of outcastes/untouchables who have been high achievers once given the chance. For example during british rule the bengali outcaste, Meghnad Saha, from what is now Bangladesh did cutting edge scientific work that many think should have earned him a Nobel Prize:

“The impetus given to astrophysics by Saha’s work can scarcely be overestimated, as nearly all later progress in this field has been influenced by it and much of the subsequent work has the character of refinements of Saha’s ideas.” S. Rosseland in Theoretical Astrophysics (Oxford University Press, 1939)

Regarding anti-meritocratic - the dravidians have a 69% anti-brahmin quota

The other thing they have done is to dumb down the curriculum in the state board, so that everyone gets high grades and artificially erase the gap between brahmins and dravidians

Finally of course every dravidian leader tries to get a trophy brahmin wife

Untouchable leaders - many of them have trophy brahmin wives

Regarding Kerala Nairs, they look virtually identical to South Indian brahmins ( because their genes got improved by Nambudiri brahmins ). And they are a lot more handsome than Tamil dravidians and thats why Tamil dravidians voted a Nair as Chief minister for decades.

The California National Merit list shows what happens without any of the so called brahminical oppression, under equal starting conditions and a pure meritocracy and only 25 out of 184 Indians are dravidians, and of them only 5 are tamil dravidians.

"The Presidential Scholars are not "the highest-achieving national merit scholars". They are the ones with the best teacher recommendations. So they're usually the nicer kids among the NMS finalists but no more."

Since there are only 141 Presidential Scholars selected per year, it's likely you know one or two but only if you attended a top 5 university. I knew one, and he was 0.01% brilliant, not 1% smart. It's true that your teachers need to be behind you to win this honor, but it truly is an impressive honor.

Presidential scholars are explicitly 2 per state (1 boy, 1 girl + an adidtional 25 or so nationally for excellence in art or performance (music, theatre, etc.) Invites to compete are sent to the top 1% or so on SAT/PSAT in the state.

Black people have always been the best athletes in this country. But it is only about 50 years ago that blacks started becoming successful in sports. Why? Because prior to this, they were discriminated against.

No. It was about 50 years ago that black athletes started receiving preferential discrimination.

If you're a big strong athletic white guy with an IQ of 95, you're expected to not go to college. If you're a big strong athletic black guy with an IQ of 95, you do get to go to college.

College functions in America as the entryway into professional sports. If you want to know who's going to be in the NFL or NBA five years from now, you look at who is currently in college. That's fact #1.

Fact #2 is that affirmative action works to populate American colleges with African-American jocks. Give that your university must have a certain percentage of blacks, and that most blacks lack the academic ability to be there in the first place, the typical American "institute of higher learning" dispenses to a large degree with any pretense that its black students are supposed to be intelligent and simply selects the biggest and strongest blacks (but not whites) it can find.

A few decades of this and the notion that black men are superior physical specimens with pure testosterone flowing in their veins gets cemented in the popular consciousness.

East Asians have higher mathematical I.Q than whites, and obviously work harder. But they are lacking in creativity.

Well, here's one bit of evidence on the whether or not East Asians are reasonably creative and innovative...

A couple of months ago, I was reading a few of the books by Lothrop Stoddard, one of America's foremost public intellectuals of a century ago, and a vastly more significant thinker than today's paid shills such as Charles Murray. In the introduction to one of his books, he argued that prior to about the mid-18th century, the only signficant technological innovations which distinguished modern Europe from classical Greece and Rome were the printing press, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder.

Now although Stoddard didn't mention it, I've read that a reasonable case can be made that all three of these crucial inventions first appeared in China, though for various political, social, and economic reasons they were not fully implemented.

So if all three of the most important inventions of that two thousand year period were (arguably) first made by the Chinese, perhaps the Chinese aren't quite as totally uncreative as certain commenters sometimes allege...

"So if all three of the most important inventions of that two thousand year period were (arguably) first made by the Chinese, perhaps the Chinese aren't quite as totally uncreative as certain commenters sometimes allege..."

Look, the Greeks have been underachieving for the last millennium or so. Why expect the Chinese to live up to the creativity of their ancient forebears? White Europeans are still a mere eye-blink from their intellectual Golden Age. Their creativity might be somewhat attenuated but I'd say by much less than an e-folding time.

"Bad comparison because the Chinese are genetically more similar to their forebears than the Greeks."

Most Greeks are same old Greeks, and they look it too. I know cuz I know plenty of Greeks. Fun people but never to be trusted. And Greece began to stagnate long before invasions by 'barbaric peoples'. As cutting edge civilization, it was finished by 200 BC.

Most Greeks are same old Greeks, and they look it too. I know cuz I know plenty of Greeks. Fun people but never to be trusted.And Greece began to stagnate long before invasions by 'barbaric peoples'. As cutting edge civilization, it was finished by 200 BC.

So you know Ancient Greeks because you know plenty of modern Greeks.

Think about this for a minute. The USA is still over 50 years away from the 300th anniversary of the Declaration, yet by the time we reach that anniversary over half the nation will have become unrecognizable to the Founders. All of this has occurred with no invading or occupying foreign armies.

It has been 8 times that long since Alexander. Greece has been conquered and occupied over and over. Additionally, it is at a geographic crossroads of culture so foot traffic like our current wave of Mexicans must have also occurred in addition to conquering armies.

Do you seriously believe modern Greeks are still genetically similar to the ancients? Just because the La Raza head speaks English and recites the Pledge of Allegiance does not make her Jefferson's descendant. Likewise just because modern Greeks speak the language doesn't make them any more related to the Ancients.

Most Greeks are same old Greeks, and they look it too. I know cuz I know plenty of Greeks. Fun people but never to be trusted.

I really tend to doubt that.

Back a year or two ago, I read a stunning modern article which rather persuasively argued from the evidence of the classical texts that a fairly substantial fraction of the Ancient Greeks were blond and blue-eyed, clear racial markers which are almost totally absent among modern Greeks. Obviously, the exact prevalence of such phenotypic markers among the Ancients isn't easy to determine, and others have disputed some of the evidence. But while I doubt the Hellenes were ever as fair as today's Swedes, I was left with the strong impressive that their racial background was probably somewhere in the vicinity of the French of 1800, namely that they contained a strong Nordic strain.

Yet today's Greeks are genetically almost indistinguishable from the Turks and seem pretty close to lots of other Middle Easterners. One plausible hypothesis, developed during the late 19th century, is that they're mostly the descendents of the vast numbers of Middle Eastern slaves who were imported into Greece following the Conquests of Alexander, though there are other explanations as well.

RKU said, "Yet today's Greeks are genetically almost indistinguishable from the Turks and seem pretty close to lots of other Middle Easterners. One plausible hypothesis, developed during the late 19th century, is that they're mostly the descendents of the vast numbers of Middle Eastern slaves who were imported into Greece following the Conquests of Alexander, though there are other explanations as well."

Remember also that much of the known world back then was Hellenized in the way that the modern world is Westernized in general and Americanized in particular in regards to language, culture, etc. So many non Greeks adopted the language and customs of the Greeks and probably made their way back to Greece much like denizens of the empire made it back to Rome and now London and the US. So it does seem plausible that modern Greeks are not genetically similar to Ancients.

If the gap in creative outcomes was 20-30%, we could nitpick. But even excusing the billion Chinese, European-origin Whites have been getting Nobel Prize at around 500-1000% higher rates than the almost 200 million Japanese/Korean.

Even Eastern Europe, which is poorer than Japan/Korea, got more prizes.

Regarding the time-lag excuse, we have shorter lag measures. The John Bates Clark medal is given to the best economist under 40. Not once has it gone to an East Asian, even though perhaps 20-25% of graduate students in economics in American schools are East Asian.

I am not writing this for pride/resentment (I am neither white nor East Asian). It just provokes me that people dismiss empirical evidence of HBD based on flimsy arguments, such as the usual liberal gibberish about the great Arab civilization etc.

Regarding the Japanese during WWII:

“once Japan’s mostly imitative aircraft industry was cut off from the main technical innovations of western powers, it proved incapable of keeping pace with rapid technological change.”

"If the gap in creative outcomes was 20-30%...Regarding the time-lag excuse...I am not writing this for pride/resentment...It just provokes me that people dismiss empirical evidence of HBD based on flimsy arguments...Regarding the Japanese during WWII"

I don't know, you may be right although as the rate of innovation is declining in the west then eventually the gap will be very small anyway so similar technology plus more cohesive nations (if still true at that point) - so still a winning hand.

“I don't know, you may be right although as the rate of innovation is declining in the west then eventually the gap will be very small anyway so similar technology plus more cohesive nations (if still true at that point) - so still a winning hand.”

Innovation can only produce really significant rent if you restrain the technology domestically. If the U.S and Europe did that, blocking China from their innovations and only selling the products (not the technology, where possible), they could maintain an economic advantage. But that is a pipe dream. Today innovation flows between countries, so the benefits of white creativity is reaped by all equally.

But you are missing the point of the comparison. The point is East Asian are genetically (or perhaps deeply culturally) less creative, for whatever reason. We all notice that when talking to them. You can also find signs in objective outcomes.

"European-origin Whites have been getting Nobel Prize at around 500-1000% higher rates than the almost 200 million Japanese/Korean."

Yeah but you're kind of missing the point. South Korea modernized 100 years after Japan, and someone already pointed out that Japan had 5 nobel prizes in the sciences from 1900-2000, but 10 from 2000-2010. Either the Japanese became 20x more creative all of a sudden, or something else is going on.

Here is a quote from Stoddards book. Fascinatingly, it is essentially the same argument being made by many today. Funny how little things change! Astute observers will notice that no mention is made of any supposed Chinese intellectual superiority.

Certainly no one has ever denied the Chinaman's extraordinary economic efficiency. Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fieriest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand's breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.'

It is curious that in the volumnious literature by Western observers of the Chinese, even their most passionate and ardent admirers have not made any special mention of the Chinese intellect. This during a period when the most bigoted, anti-Semitic writers had no hesitation in calling Jews extremely clever. Indeed, sheer intelligence was not considered supremely important (character counted for more, especially with the British, who had no problems admitting the superior intellect of the Jew, but for whom of course mere *intellect* was less important than character), so we can be sure that if a superior Chinese intellect had been observed, white racial pride would not have prevented writers of the time from mentioning it profusely. Yet nothing. Cunning, yes, industrious, yes, wily, yes, but especially intelligent, no.

Even Bertrand Russell, the most ardent and enthusiastic admirer of the Chinese - he actually said that China was the greatest civilization he had EVER encountered! - and certainly a man completely free of any racial pride, mentioned that he did not find the Chinese capacity for cunning any greater than what he found in the poorer classes in England, and otherwise made no comments about the special intelligence of the Chinese in his book On China - and remember, he associated with the best educated class in China.

What Russell so admired about the Chinese was their extreme pacifism at a time when was Europe was rushing into an insane war, and the social graces exhibited by educated Chinese.

It would seem that the theme of an *appalling* industriousness and willingness to tolerate crushing labor for seemingly minute rewards was the theme that struck most observers again and again about the Chinese, then as today.

He got a great many major predictions right in his paramount 1920 "Rising Tide of Color". In his chapter on the Orientals, he focused mainly on Japan, of course. IIRC, his main focus regarding China was the likelihood of Han-Chinese expansion, colonizing other areas of 'China' (which happened) and the numbers of Overseas-Chinese in Asia swelling (which happened).

How many other thinkers of the WWI era got so many predictions about the course of the subsequent century correct?

To be fair, Russell also considered the Chinese intellect fully equal to the European in every respect.

My point was simply that over centuries of interaction, no one seems to have been struck by the idea that the Chinese were smarter than Europeans, yet time and time again what struck Europeans most strongly about the Chinese was their capacity for grinding labor and indifference to severe hardship.

No one really thought Chinese were especially smart until IQ tests began to *tell* us so, and it seems today that people are still skeptical over the idea that the Chinese are significantly more intelligent than Europeans. Yet the idea that Jews ARE is widely accepted, and has always been. The simplest explanation for this difference in attitude is fairly obvious.

@Hail, I just checked up on Stoddard after RKU mentioned him - it seems 2 of his books are free for the kindle on amazon. I always thought he was just some white nationalist racist crackpot before, but if RKU vouches for him maybe he has some interesting things to say. Seems he used to be a bit more mainstream than I thought.

Of the Chinese themselves, Kennan wrote that they were “probably the most intelligent, man for man, of the world’s peoples.” But “admirable as were many of their qualities—their industriousness, their business honesty, their practical astuteness … they seemed to me to be lacking in two attributes of the Western-Christian mentality: the capacity for pity and the sense of sin. I was quite prepared to concede that both of these qualities represented weaknesses rather than sources of strength in the Western character. The Chinese, presumably, were all the more formidable for the lack of them.”

Here is a quote from Stoddards book...Astute observers will notice that no mention is made of any supposed Chinese intellectual superiority.

Actually, Stoddard probably isn't the best source to quote on these issues, since he was more of a theoretical synthesizer (and political ideologue) rather than someone with detailed subject-area knowledge. I believe his primary source here was A.E. Ross, America's greatest early sociologist, who actually spent some time in China and published an excellent book describing that country. Ross regarded the Chinese as being more or less about as smart as Anglo-Saxons, but certainly far harder working and able to more easily tolerate difficult conditions. The Chinese were also perhaps the world's best entrepreneurial businessmen.

Overall European opinions of China seem to have jumped around over the centuries. I think Marco Polo described China as a civilization vastly superior in most respects to the Europe of his own day, and Voltaire and the French philosophes similarly had a very high opinion of Chinese thinking and philosophy. I've also read that Prussia modelled its system of service-aristocracy, one of the central pillars of its rise to future greatness, upon the meritocratic Mandarin system. However, by the 19th Century, European advances had left China far behind technologically, and it became increasingly regarded as backward and ignorant.

As for the Jews, I'm not sure that anyone ever considered them as being notably intelligent until just the last couple of centuries, or at least that's what Cochran/Harpending claimed in their detailed historical research. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Ross actually published another book discussing in detail all of the different immigrant groups then coming to America, and included a chapter on the Jews. As suggested, he regarded them as highly intelligent, quite possibly the highest ability group to arrive in America since the original Puritan settlers. However, he also recounted in detail certain other basic Jewish traits, which were considerably less favorable.

I've sometimes told people that we'd be far better off if we simply burned every social science book published in the last seventy-odd years and derived our understanding of the world from the earlier ones, which were enormously more accurate and honest. Presumably, that's exactly what many Russians did after the 1991 Fall of Communism.

Did George Kenan come after the advent of IQ tests? I probably should have made clear that I was talking about the extensive pre-20th century contact Europeans had with the Chinese, but I thought it was obvious.

Beginning in the late 19th century and picking up steam from there, it has become quite the fashion for Europeans to compare themselves unfavorably to almost any other people who has any good quality whatsoever (and sometimes to invent good qualities in others)- its a kind of intellectual asceticism. The point is to show how well you have subdued your emotional impulse towards self love, and to demonstrate generosity of spirit and largeness of mind towards nations whose success is not as embarrassingly decisive as your own (i.e all non-Europeans). It is quite simply bad form to crow over your own success. In this context, self-abnegation is a kind of instinctive, collective tact on the part of educated Westerners. Humility is also the privilege of the winner, if you will.

What many dont get is that there is an enormous amount of condescension in this attitude - we are essentially saying *you others matter so little that we do not even feel compelled to assert our superiority over you, something which EVERY other people is at enormous pains to do*. The moment hot headed Asians cease making a point of asserting their superiority to whites, is the moment they begin to despise us. The moment educated Westerners cease their humility before the world, is the moment they begin to take the rest of the world seriously.

Note - I am not saying these respective attitudes NECESSARILY occur when people feel successful or nurse secret doubts of inferiority, but that it is quite characteristic for them to occur in those contexts.

No one really thought Chinese were especially smart until IQ tests began to *tell* us so, and it seems today that people are still skeptical over the idea that the Chinese are significantly more intelligent than Europeans. Yet the idea that Jews ARE is widely accepted, and has always been.

It's true that prior to IQ tests nobody seems to have regarded the Chinese as being highly intelligent. But the same is mostly true of Jews. And in truth it seems to be quite likely that, prior to the 19th century, Jews were not notably intelligent.

It is not true that Jews have "always" been "accepted" as being intelligent. That's an idea of very recent origin.

I guess your only excuse is to keep repeating that Japan/Korea went from 5 to 10 Nobels per *decade*. You don’t seem able to understand that even 10 per decade is low per capita compared to white Europeans. In 2011 alone there were 9 white awards.

The most wide used test of creativity in academic research was developed by American psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance. Already in the late 1960s Torrance-test detected a huge gap in creativity between white children and East Asian children in Singapore.

But I guess the Asian nationalists here will not be satisfied with any amount of empirical evidence, because your opposition is not grounded in reason, but in racial pride. This is just a repeat of IQ-denialists.

Both asians and whites reveal their insecurities here. Asians are smarter than whites and will dominate formal academia in terms of academic placdments. Whites will continue to do better than expected by looking at their iq when it comes to the highest echelons of creative expression including nobels and fields.

@Anon, there is another factor, in that the very nature of the IIT exam has changed

Previously people prepared for it for a few months, along with the 12th grade board exam

The 12th grade board exam, was the bird in hand, vs IIT as the 2 birds in the bush.

These days it is either IIT or 12th grade board exam. And if you fail to get into IIT, you are fully screwed. Whereas by focusing on 12th grade board exam, you can easily get into colleges, half a step below IIT

For example to get into NIT, which are ranked 15th in India( 1 to 14 are IIT ), you have to do well in the 12th grade board exam and the AIEEE exam, which is based on the CBSE board exam, and is a surer bet than spending 2 years coaching for the IIT and ignoring 12th grade board and ending up with nothing

My nieces who got PhD in the USA, and 1510 GRE, deliberately avoided IIT as it was too risky and got ranks 1, and 4 in the TN state for CBSE, 12th grade

Now although Stoddard didn't mention it, I've read that a reasonable case can be made that all three of these crucial inventions first appeared in China, though for various political, social, and economic reasons they were not fully implemented.

So Asians couldn't figure out much of anything interesting to do with printing presses, gunpowder, or the compass? They created cultures that are profoundly stagnant? That's not strong evidence that there're creative. Perhaps Asians are just extremely incurious.

This thread isn't dominated by Asian nationalism but the insecurity of white nationalists who can't stand the idea of their race holding an inferior intelligence rank.

Really? That's odd, because White Nationalists seem to me to accept the slightly higher Yellow mean IQ. That's certainly borne out in this thread. What they have trouble with is the predictions of technical supremacy based on that data. I mean, why shouldn't they be skeptical? It's like saying, "It's so obvious we're going to win the game on Sunday, just look at our 40 yard dash times, they average 5% faster!" But that same roster has been losing for centuries.

Obviously China will have the biggest economy, eventually. That isn't much to brag about, given the biggest population.

Mean IQ doesn't translate into technical, societal, or innovative supremacy. It hasn't in the past, and it probably won't in the future.

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